The Fifth-Dimension Tube
Informations
| Publié par | shauh |
| Publié le | 08 décembre 2010 |
| Nombre de lectures | 73 |
| Langue | English |
Extrait
Project Gutenberg's The Fifth-Dimension Tube, by William Fitzgerald Jenkins This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Fifth-Dimension Tube Author: William Fitzgerald Jenkins Release Date: November 6, 2009 [EBook #30408] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIFTH-DIMENSION TUBE ***
Produced by Greg Weeks, Barbara Tozier and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
This etext was produced fromAstounding Stories January 1933. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
A Sequel to “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult”
Evelyn swayed … and the Thing moved!
The Fifth-Dimension Tube
A Complete Novelette By Murray Leinster
By way of Professor Denham’s Tube, Tommy and Evelyn invade the inimical Fifth-Dimensional world of golden cities and tree-fern jungles and Ragged Men.
CHAPTER I The Tube Tdmeum hmonayrotiuq al earobe Tholwhspm d.ee .hT eydbiaritnoom its vvered frEHretag neumblor rnd red ab ,derao gnidliuito tupmuximas and whined and the night silence outside seemed to make the noises within more deafening. Tommy Reames ran his eyes again over the power-leads to the monstrous, misshapen coils. Professor Denham bent over one of them, straightened, and nodded. Tommy Reames nodded to Evelyn, and she threw the heavy multiple-pole switch. There was a flash of jumping current. The masses of metal on the floor seemed to leap into ungainly life. The whine of the dynamo rose to a scream and its brushes streaked blue flame. The metal things on the floor flicked together and were a tube, three feet and more in diameter. That tube writhed and twisted. It began to form itself into an awkward and seemingly impossible shape, while metal surfaces sliding on each other produced screams that cut through the din of the motor and dynamo. The writhing tube strained and wriggled. Then there was a queer, inaudiblesnapand something gave. A part of the tube quivered into nothingness. Another part hurt the eyes that looked upon it. And then there was the smell of burned insulation and a wire was arcing somewhere, while thick rubbery smoke arose. A fuse blew out with a thunderous report, and Tommy Reames leaped to the suddenly racing motor-generator. The motor died amid gasps and rumblings. And Tommy Reames looked anxiously at the Fifth-Dimension Tube. It was important, that Tube. Through it, Tommy Reames and Professor Denham had reason to believe they could travel to another universe, of which other men had only dreamed. And it was important in other ways, too. At the moment Evelyn Denham threw the switch, last-edition newspapers in Chicago were showing headlines about “King” Jacaro’s forfeiture of two hundred thousand dollars’ bail by failing to appear in court. King Jacaro was a lord of racketeerdom. While Tommy inspected the Tube anxiously, a certain chief of police in a small town upstate was telling feverishly over the telephone of a posse having killed a monster lizard by torchlight, having discovered it in the act of devouring a cow. The lizard was eight feet high, walked on its hind legs, and had a collar of solid gold about its neck. And jewel importers, in New York, were in anxious conference about a flood of untraced jewels upon the market. Their origin was unknown. The Fifth-Dimension Tube ultimately affected all of those affairs, and the Death Mist as well. And—though it was
not considered dangerous then—everybody remembers the Death Mist now. But at the moment Professor Denham stared at the Tube concernedly, his daughter Evelyn shivered from pure excitement as she looked at it, and a red-headed man named Smithers looked impassively from the Tube to Tommy Reames and back again. He’d done most of the mechanical work on the Tube’s parts, and he was as anxious as the rest. But nobody thought of the world outside the laboratory. Professor Denham moved suddenly. He was nearest to the open end of the Tube. He sniffed curiously and seemed to listen. Within seconds the others became aware of a new smell in the laboratory. It seemed to come from the Tube itself, and it was a warm, damp smell that could only be imagined as coming from a jungle in the tropics. There were the rich odors of feverishly growing things; the heavy fragrance of unknown tropic blossoms, and a background of some curious blend of scents and smells which was alien and luring, and exotic. The whole was like the smell of another planet of the jungles of a strange world which men had never trod. And then, definitely coming out of the Tube, there was a hollow, booming noise. I sounded suddenly above it—human yells, wild yells, insane, half-gibbering yells of hysterical excitement and blood lust. The beast-thing bellowed and a n ululating chorus of joyous screams arose. The laboratory reverberated with the thunderous noise. Then there was the sound of crashing and of paddings, and abruptly the noise was diminishing as if its source were moving farther away. The beast-thing roared and bellowed as if in agony, and the yelling noise seemed to show that men were following close upon its flanks. Those in the laboratory seemed to awaken as if from a bad dream. Denham was kneeling before the mouth of the Tube, an automatic rifle in his hands. Tommy Reames stood grimly before Evelyn. He’d snatched up a pair of automatic pistols. Smithers clutched a spanner and watched the mouth of the Tube with a strained attention. Evelyn stood shivering behind Tommy. Tommy said with a hint of grim humor: “I don’t think there’s any doubt about the Tube having gotten through. That’s the Fifth Dimension planet, all right.” He smiled at Evelyn. She was deathly pale. “I—remember—hearing noises like that….” Denham stood up. He painstakingly slipped on the safety of his rifle and laid it on a bench with the other guns. There was a small arsenal on a bench at one side of the laboratory. The array looked much more like arms for in expedition into dangerous territory than a normal part of apparatus for an experiment in rather abstruse mathematical physics. There were even gas masks on the bench, and some of those converted brass Very pistols now used only for discharging tear- and sternutatory-gas bombs. “The Tube wasn’t seen, anyhow,” said Professor Denham briskly. “Who’s going through first?” Tommy slung a cartridge belt about his waist and a gas mask about his neck. “I am,” he said shortly. “We’ll want to camouflage the mouth of the Tube. I’ll watch a bit before I get out.” He crawled into the mouth of the twisted pipe. T It was not an experiment made at random, nor was the world to which it reached an unknown one to Tommy or to Denham. Months before, Denham had built an instrument which would bend a ray of light into the Fifth
on.ectie hco dnae fs hcol soien adseat erw re eigagtncieet long,and the fvefis wan ioctes hcae ,ssorca feetree y thearlsan ebw EuTH
* “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult”—see theJanuary, 1931, issue of Astounding Stories.
Dimension and had found that he could fix a telescope to the device and look into a new and wholly strange cosmos.* He had seen tree-fern jungles and a monstrous red sun, and all the flora and fauna of a planet in the carboniferous period of development. More, by the accident of its placing he had seen the towers and the pinnacles of a city whose walls and towers seemed plated with gold. Having gone so far, he had devised a catapult which literally flung objects to the surface of that incredible world. Insects, birds, and at last a cat had made the journey unharmed, and he had built a steel globe in which to attempt the journey in person. His daughter Evelyn had demanded to accompany him, and he believed it safe. The trip had been made in security, but return was another matter. A laboratory assistant, Von Holtz, had sent them into the Fifth Dimension, only to betray them. One King Jacaro, lord of Chicago racketeers, was convinced by him of the existence of the golden city of that other world, and that it was full of delectable loot. He offered a bribe past envy for the secret of Denham’s apparatus. And Von Holtz had removed the apparatus for Denham’s return before working the catapult to send him on his strange journey. He wanted to be free to sell full privileges of rapine and murder to Jacaro. The result was unexpected. Von Holtz could not unravel the secret of the catapult he himself had operated. He could not sell the secret for which he had committed a crime. In desperation he called in Tommy Reames—rather more than an amateur in mathematical physics—showed him Evelyn and her father marooned in a tree-fern jungle, and hypocritically asked for aid. Tommy’s enthusiastic efforts soon became more than merely enthusiastic. The men of the Golden City remained invisible, but there were strange, half-mad outlaws of the jungles who hated the city. Tommy Reames had watched helplessly as they hunted for the occupants of the steel globe. He had worked frenziedly to achieve a rescue. In the course of his labor he discovered the treachery of Von Holtz as well as the secret of the catapult, and with the aid of Smithers—who had helped to build the original catapult—he made a new small device to achieve the original end. T and Evelyn in a forlorn attempt at rescue. Tommy Reames went mad. He u se d a tiny sub-machine gun upon the Ragged Men through the model magnetic catapult he had made, and contrived communication with Denham afterward. Instructed by Denham, he brought about the return of father and daughter to Earth just before Ragged Men and Earthling alike would have perished in a vengeful gas cloud from the Golden City. Even then, though, his triumph was incomplete because Von Holtz had gotten word to Jacaro, and nattily-dressed gunmen raided the laboratory and made off with the model catapult, leaving three bullets in Tommy and one in Smithers as souvenirs. Now, using the principle developed in the catapult, Tommy and Denham had built a large Tube, and as Tommy climbed along its corrugated interior he knew a good part of what he should expect at the other end. A steady current of air blew past him. It was laden with a myriad unfamiliar scents. The Tube was a tunnel from one set of dimensions to another, a permanent way from Earth to a strange, carboniferous-period planet on which a monstrous dull-red sun shone hotly. Tommy should come out into a tree-fern forest whose lush vegetation would hide the sky, and which furnished a lurking place not only for strange reptilian monsters akin to those of the long-dead past of Earth, but for the bands of ragged, half-mad human beings who were outlaws from the civilization of which Denham and Evelyn had seen proofs.
T filled with the heavy fragrance of a tree-fern jungle upon an unknown planet. The heavy, sickly-sweet scents of closed jungle blossoms filled their nostrils. The reek of feverishly growing green things saturated the air. A steady wind blew down the Tube, and it bore innumerable unfamiliar odors into the laboratory. Once a gigantic moth bumped and blundered into the Tube, and finally crawled heavily out into the light. It was scaled, and terrible because of its monstrous size, but it had broken a wing and could not fly. So it crawled with feverish haste toward a brilliant electric light. Its eyes were especially horrible because they were not compound like the moths of Earth. They were single, like those of a man, and were fixed in an expression of utter, fascinated hypnosis. The thing looked horribly human with those eyes staring from an insect’s head, and Smithers killed it in a flash of nerve-racked horror. None of them were able to go on with their work until the thing and its fascinated, staring eyes had been put out of sight. Then they labored on with the smell of the jungles of that unnamed planet thick about them, and noises now and then coming down the Tube. There were roars, and growlings, and once there was a thin high sound which seemed like the far-distant, death-startled scream of a man.
OMM ird bend in the Tube. By now he TacheY ree thd thnA .jbo tce yam bbet enrothh ug aehn odhoglitrsnaa ltl se nlgesleyoofnn o riientation two dimensions, and a second perfect right angle—at ninety degrees to all former paths—only in three dimensions. It follows that a third perfect right angle requires four dimensions for existence, and four perfect right angles five. The Tube bent itself through four perfect right angles, and since no human-being can ever have experience of more than three dimensions, plus time, it followed that Tommy was experiencing other dimensions than those of Earth as soon as he passed the third bend. In short, he was in another cosmos. There was a moment of awful sickness as he passed the third bend. He was hideously dizzy when he passed the fourth. For a time he felt as if he had no weight at all. But then, quite abruptly, he was climbing vertically upward and the soughing of tree-fern fronds was loud in his ears, and suddenly the end of the Tube was under his fingers and he stared out into the world of the Fifth Dimension. Now a gentle wind blew in his face. Tree-ferns rose to incredible heights above his head, and now and again by the movements of their fronds he caught stray glimpses of unfamiliar stars. There were red stars, and blue ones, and once he caught sight of a clearly distinguishable double star, of which each component was visible to the naked eye. And very, very far away he heard the beastly yellings he knew must be the outlaws, the Ragged Men, feasting horribly on half-scorched flesh torn from the quivering, yet-living flanks of a monstrous reptile. Something moved, whimpered—and fled suddenly. It sounded like a human being. And Tommy Reames was struck with the utterly impossible conviction that he had heard just that sound before. It was not dangerous, in any case, and he watched, and listened, and presently he slipped from the mouth of the Tube and by the glow of a flashlight stripped foliage from nearby growths and piled it about the Tube’s mouth. And then, because the purpose of the Tube was not adventure but science, he went back down into the laboratory.
CHAPTER II The Death Mist
“JACARO’S missing,” said Denham harshly. “This article says he’s vanished, and with him a dozen of his most prominent gunmen. You know he had a model catapult to duplicate—the one he got from you. Von Holtz could arrange the construction of a big Tube for him. And he knew about the Golden City. Look!” His finger, trembling, tapped on the flashlight picture of the giant lizard of which the story told. And it was a giant. A rope had upheld a colossal, leering, reptilian head while men with rifles posed self-consciously beside the dead creature. It was as big as a horse, and at first glance its kinship to the extinct dinosaurs of Earth was plain. Huge teeth in sharklike rows. A long, trailing tail. But there was a collar about the beast-thing’s neck. “It had killed and was devouring a cow when they shot it,” said Denham bitterly. “There’ve been reports of these creatures for days—so the news story says. They weren’t printed because nobody believed them. But there are a couple of people missing. A searching party was hunting for them. They found this!” Tommy Reames stared at the picture. His face went grimmer still. He thought of sounds he had heard beyond the Tube, not long since. “There’s no question where they came from. The Fifth Dimension. But if Jacaro brought them back, he’s a fool.” “Jacaro’s missing,” said Denham savagely. “Don’t you understand? He could get through to the Golden City. These beast-things are proof somebody did. And these things came down the Tube that somebody travelled through. Jacaro wouldn’t send them, but somebod did. The ’ve ot collars around
T gray outlines. The many-colored stars grew pale. And presently a bit of crimson light peeped through the jungle somewhere. It moved along the horizon and very slowly grew higher. For a moment, Tommy saw the huge, dull-red ball that was the sun of this alien planet. Queer mosses took form and color in the daylight, displaying colors never seen on Earth. He saw flying things dart among the tree-fern fronds, and some were scaled and some were not, but none of them were feathered. Then a tiny buzzing noise. The telephone that now rested below the lip of the Tube was being used from the laboratory. “Smithers will relieve you,” said Denham’s voice in the receiver. “Come on down. We’re not the only people experimenting with the Fifth Dimension. Jacaro’s been working, and all hell’s loose!” Tommy slid down the Tube in an instant. The four right-angled turns made him sick and dizzy again, but he came out with his jaw set grimly. There was good reason for Tommy’s interest in Jacaro. Besides sides three bullet wounds, Tommy owed Jacaro something for stealing the first model Tube. He emerged in the laboratory on his hands and knees as the size of the Tube made necessary. Smithers smiled placidly at him and crawled in to take his place. “What the devil happened?” demanded Tommy. Denham was bitter. He held a newspaper before him. Evelyn had brought coffee and the morning paper to the laboratory. She seemed rather pale. “Jacaro’s gotten through too!” snapped Denham. “He’s gotten in a pack of trouble. And he’s loosed the devil on Earth. Here—look!” He jabbed his finger at one headline. “And here—and here!” He thrust at others. “Here’s proof.” The first headline read: “KING JACARO FORFEITS BOND.” Smaller headings beneath it read: “Racketeer Missing for Income Tax Trial. $200,000 Bail Forfeited.” The second headline was in smaller type: “Monster Lizard Killed! Giant Meat Eater Brought Down by Rifleman. Akin to Ancient Dinosaurs, Say Scientists.”
esw nir dus eeron gwas he hilehtuomeht ta drauTh. beTue thf oresna ob erteef-ame intove him cgav eueiv sa wYMR AEEM Sas whtOM
their necks! Who sent them? And why?” Tht ekil et woe, iseemuld tu h eomT bufoa d zen meunfothd eworI“.dic filivOMMY’S eyes nar mouth of an artificial tunnel or a cave—” “And if annoying vermin, like Jacaro’s gunmen”—Denham’s voice was brittle—“had come out of it, why, intelligent men might send something living and deadly down it, as men on Earth will send ferrets down a rat-hole! To wipe out the breed! That’s what’s happened! Jacaro’s gone through and attacked the Golden City. They’ve found his Tube. And they’ve sent these things down….” “Ifwecoming from a rat-hole,” said Tommy very quietly, “andfound rats ferrets went down and didn’t come up, we’d gas them.” “And so,” Denham told him, “so would the Golden City.” He pointed to a boxed double paragraph news story under leaded twenty-point headline: “Poisonous Fog Kills Wild Life.” The story was not alarming. It said merely that state game wardens had found numerous dead game animals in a thinly-settled district near Coltsville, N.Y., and on investigation had found a bank of mist, all of half a mile across, which seemed to have caused the trouble. State chemists and biologists were investigating the phenomenon. Curiously, the bank of mist seemed not to dissipate in a normal fashion. Samples of the fog were being analyzed. It was probably akin to the Belgian fogs which on several occasions had caused much loss of life. The mist was especially interesting because in sunlight it displayed prismatic colorings. State troopers were warning the inhabitants of the neighborhood. “The gassing’s started,” said Denham savagely. “I know a gas that shows rainbow colors. The Golden City uses it. So we’ve got to find Jacaro’s Tube and seal it, or only God knows what will come out of it next. I’m going off, Tommy. You and Smithers guard our Tube. Blow it up, if necessary. It’s dangerous. I’ll get some authority in Albany, and we’ll find Jacaro’s Tube and blast it shut ” . Tommy nodded, his eyes keen and thoughtful. Denham hurried out. Mboratory. Evelynt irdet omsli e Tatmyom. aaco forraht eg dogointor r mo enal gnoleht nwlae thm ro fayawetalo ,rUNI SEThey d ary,nlhe t “It seems terrible, dangerous.” Tommy considered and shrugged. “This news is old,” he observed. “This paper was printed last night. I think I’ll make a couple of long-distance calls. If the Golden City’s had trouble with Jacaro, it’s going to make things bad for us.” He swept his eyes about and frowningly loaded a light rifle. He put it convenient to Evelyn’s hand and made for the dwelling-house and the telephone. It was odd that as he emerged into the open air, the familiar smells of Earth struck his nostrils as strange and unaccustomed. The laboratory was redolent of the tree-fern forest into which the Tube extended. And Smithers was watching amid those dank, incredible carboniferous-period growths now. Tommy put through calls, seeing all his and Denham’s plans for a peaceful exploration party and amicable contact with the civilization of that other planet, utterly shattered by presumed outrages by Jacaro. He made call after call, and his demands for information grew more urgent as he got closer to the source of trouble. His cause for worry was verified long before he had finished. Even as he made the first call, New York newspapers had crowded a second-grade murder off their front pages to make room for the white mist upstate.
HE early-morning editions had termed it a “poisonous fog.” The
breakfast editions spoke of it as a “poison fog.” But it grew and moved and by the time Tommy had a clear line to get actual information about it, a tabloid had christened it the “Death Mist” and there were three chartered planes circling about it for the benefit of their newspapers. State troopers were being reinforced. At ten o’clock it was necessary to post extra traffic police to take care of the cars headed upstate to look at the mystery. At eleven it began to move! Sluggishly, to be sure, and rather raggedly, but it undoubtedly moved, and as undoubtedly it moved independently of the wind. It was at twelve-thirty that the first casualty occurred. Before that time, the police had frantically demanded that the flood of sightseers be stopped. The Death Mist covered a square mile or more. It clung to the ground, nowhere more than fifty or sixty feet high, and glittered with all the colors of the rainbow. It moved with a velocity of anywhere from ten to twenty miles an hour. In its path were a myriad small tragedies—nesting birds stiff and still, and rabbits and other small furry bodies contorted in queer agonized postures. But until twelve-thirty no human beings were known to be its victims. Then, though, it was moving blindly across the wind with a thin trailing edge behind it and a rolling billow of descending mist as its forefront. It rolled up to and across a concrete highway, watched by perspiring motor cops who had performed miracles in clearing a path for it among the horde of sightseeing cars. It swept on into a spindling pine wood. Behind it lay a thinning sheet of vapor—thick white mist which seemed to rise and move more swiftly to overtake the main body. It lay across the highway in a sheet which was ten feet deep, then thinned to six, to three….
HE mist was no more than a foot thick, when a party of motorists T aessayed to drive through it as through a sheet of water. They dodged swearing motorcycle cop and, yelling hilariously, plunged forward. It happened that they had not more than a hundred yards to go, so the whole thing was plainly seen. The car was ten yards across the sheet of mist before the effect of its motion was apparent. Then the mist, torn by the car-eddy, swirled madly in their wake. The motorists yelled delightedly. There is a picture extant, taken at just this moment. It shows the driver with a foolish grin on his face, clutching the wheel and very obviously stepping on the accelerator. A pandemonium of triumphant, hilarious shouting—and then a very sudden silence. The car roared on. The road curved slightly. The car did not. It went off the road, turned over, and its engine shrieked itself into silence. The Death Mist went on, draining from the roadway to follow the tall, prismatically-colored cloud. It moved swiftly and blindly. To the circling planes above it, it seemed like a blind thing imagining itself confined, and searching for the edges of its prison. It gave an uncanny impression of being directed by intelligence. But the Death Mist, itself, was not alive. Neither were the occupants of the motor car. When Tommy got back to the laboratory after his last call for news, he found Evelyn in the act of starting to fetch him. “Smithers called,” she said uneasily. “He says something’s moving about—” The buzzer of the telephone was humming stridently. Tommy answered quickly. “Just want you handy,” said Smithers’ calm voice. “I might have to duck. Some Ragged Men are chasin’ something. Get set, will ya?” “Ready for anything,” Tommy assured him. Then he made it true: rifles handy, a sub-machine gun, grenades, gas masks. He handed one to Evelyn. Smithers had one already. Then Tommy waited, grimly ready by the Tube-mouth.
Tuld hecors, s eadno s uot ehehraonfrn er-feetrf t ni gnihsalc sd He hearhe wind.dsc, t-endelabrn EHmrawim. Straining hieeezb el wpunoh the louder sounds made by Smithers, stirring ever so slightly in the Tube. And then he caught a vague, distant uproar. It would have been faint and confused at best but the Tube was partly blocked by Smithers’ body, and there were the multiple bends further to complicate the echoes. It was no more than a formless tumult through which faint yells came occasionally. It drew nearer and nearer. Tommy heard Smithers stir suddenly, almost as if he had jumped. Then there were scrapings which could only mean one thing: Smithers was climbing out of the Tube into the jungle of the Fifth-Dimension world. The noise rose abruptly to a roar as the muffling effect of Smithers’ body was removed. The yells were sharp and savage and half mad. There was a sudden crackling sound and a voice screamed: “Gott!” The hair rose at the back of Tommy’s neck. Then there came the deafening report of an automatic pistol roaring itself empty above the end of the Tube. Smithers’ voice, vastly calm: “It’s a’right, Mr. Reames. Don’t worry.” A second pistol took up the fusillade. Yells and howls and screams arose. Men fled. Something came crashing to the mouth of the Tube. Smithers’ voice again, with purring note in it: “Get down there. I’ll hold ’em off.” Then single deliberately spaced shots, while something came stumbling, fumbling, squirming down through the Tube, so filling it that Smithers’ shooting was muted.
T of the Very pistols,HEN came the subtly different explosions discharging gas bombs. And Tommy drew back, his jaw set, and he stood with his weapons very ready indeed, and a scratched, bleeding, exhausted, panting, terror-stricken human being in the tattered costume of Earth crawled from the Tube and groveled on the floor before him. Evelyn gave a little exclamation, partly of disgust and partly of horror. Because this man, who had had come from the world of the Fifth Dimension, was wholly familiar. He was tall, and he was lean, emaciated now; he wept sobbingly behind thick-lensed spectacles, and his lips were far too full and red. His name was Von Holtz; he had once been laboratory assistant to Professor Denham, and he had betrayed Evelyn and her father to the most ghastly of possible fates for a bribe offered him by Jacaro. Now he groveled. He was horrible to look at. Where he was not scratched and torn his flesh was reddened as if by fire. He was exhausted, and trembling with an awful terror, and he gasped out abject, placatory ejaculations and suddenly collapsed into a sobbing mass on the floor. Smithers emerged from the Tube with a look of unpleasant satisfaction on his face. “I chased off the Ragged Men with sneeze gas,” he observed with a vast calmness. “They ain’t comin’ back for a while. An’ I always wanted to break this guy’s neck. I think I’ll do it now.” “Not till I’ve questioned him,” said Tommy savagely. “He and Jacaro have started hell to popping, with that Tube design they stole from me. He’s got to stay alive and tell us how to stop it. Von Holtz, talk! And talk quick, or back you go through the Tube for the Ragged Men to work on!”
CHAPTER III The Tree-Fern Jungle
OMMY watched Smithers drive away. The sun was sinking low toward
the west, and the car stirred up a cloud of light-encarmined dust as it sped down the long, narrow lane to the main road. The laboratory had intentionally been built in an isolated spot, but at the moment Tommy would have given a good deal for a few men nearby. Smithers was taking Von Holtz to Albany to add his information to Denham’s pleas. Denham had ordered it, when they reached him by phone after hours of effort. Smithers had to go, to guard against Von Holtz’s escape, even sick and ill as he was. And Evelyn had refused to go with him. “If I stay in the laboratory,” she insisted fiercely, “you can slip down and I can blow up the Tube after you, if the Ragged Men don’t stay away. But by yourself….” Tommy did not consent, but he was helpless. There was danger from the Tube. Not only from ghastly animals which might come through, but from men. Smithers had fought the Ragged Men above it. He had chased them off, but they would come back. Perhaps they would come very soon, perhaps not until Denham and Smithers had returned. If they could be held off, the as yet unknown dangers from the other Tube—of which only the lizards and the Death Mist were certainties—might be counteracted. In any case, the Tube must not be destroyed until its defense was hopeless. Tommy made up a grim bundle to go through the Tube with him: the sub-machine gun, extra drums of shells, more gas bombs and half a dozen grenades. He hung the various objects about himself. Evelyn watched him miserably. “You—you’ll be careful, Tommy?” “Nothing else but,” said Tommy. He grinned reassuringly. “There’s nothing to it, really. Just sitting still, listening. If I pop off some fireworks I’ll just have to sit down and watch them run.” H “I’m—frightened, Tommy.” “Shucks!” said Tommy. “Also a couple of tut-tuts.” He stood up, put his arms about her, and kissed her until she smiled. “Feel better now?” he asked interestedly. “Y-yes….” “Fine!” said Tommy, and grinned again. “When you feel scared again, ring me on the phone and I’ll give you another treatment.” But her smile faded as, beaming at her, he crawled into the first section of the Tube. And his own expression grew serious enough when she could see him no longer. The situation was not comfortable. Evelyn intended to marry him and he had to keep her cheerful, but he wished she were well away from here. He tried to move cautiously through the Tube, but his bundles bumped and rattled. It seemed hours before he was climbing up the last section into the tree-fern jungle. He was caution itself as he peered over the edge. It was already night upon Earth, but here the monstrous, dull-red sun was barely sinking. It moved slowly along the horizon as it dipped, but presently a gray cast come over the colorings in the forest. Flying things came clattering homeward through the masses of fern-fronds overhead. He saw a projectile-like thing with a lizard’s head and jaws go darting through an incredibly small opening. It seemed to have no wings at all. But then, in one instant, a vast wing-surface flashed out, made a single gigantic flap—and the thing was a projectile again, darting through acheraux-de-frise of interlaced fronds without a sign of wings to support it. TOMMY inspected his surroundings with an infinite care. As the darkness deepened he meditatively taped a flashlight below the barrel of the sub-machine gun. Turned on, it would cast a pitiless light upon his target, and the
© 2010-2024 YouScribe